News of the death earlier today of Judge David Trager of the United States District Court at Brooklyn reached us while the House of Representatives was still in the midst of reading aloud the full text of the Constitution. The coincidence ignited in us a sudden sadness but also of a sense of sweetness. It happens that in recent months we had been dining occasionally with the judge, increasingly so in the last months when he was battling his cancer. It is hard not to think he would have taken a certain satisfaction in the knowledge that, even while he was dying, the Constitution that he not only swore to support but spent his great career implementing in scores of cases was being revivified in the house of Congress that most intimately represents the American people.

We first began covering Judge Trager when he was at the center of one of the bitterest episodes in Brooklyn’s history, the trial of Lemrick Nelson for the killing of Yankel Rosenbaum. The killing had taken place during the Crown Heights riot. When Nelson was tried in a New York State court he was acquitted, in what many saw as a case of jury nullification. Some members of the jury went out for a celebratory dinner with the man they’d just acquitted. The federal government then put Nelson in the dock for violating Rosenbaum’s civil rights. In a trial over which Judge Trager presided, Nelson was convicted. The conviction, however, was overturned by an appeals panel that reckoned Judge Trager had sought to balance the racial and religious makeup of the jury in a way that was unconstitutional. Nelson was eventually convicted in a trial presided over by a different judge.

It had to have been a bitter humiliation for a jurist who — precisely because of the spectacle in the state court — had bent over backwards to assemble a jury that would be acceptable, as it was at trial, to both the defense and the prosecution. And would be seen as fair by all the contending communities in a borough wracked with anger. But Judge Trager bore his setback with dignity and even a sardonic humor, eschewing cynicism and maintaining his enthusiasm for the ideal of fairness and fidelity to the facts and the law. No doubt he drew part of his strength from the fact that his conduct in the Nelson trial was deeply admired by many of his closest colleagues on the bench. When we spoke this evening with the former chief judge of the Eastern District, Edward Korman, the word he used to describe Judge Trager’s conduct in the trial was “courageous.”

A long newspaper life has taught us that judges are a special, and for us especially admirable, breed of public servant. To be a judge was the dream of David Trager’s professional life. But he had to wait a long time to be able to accede to the federal bench. Nominally a Republican, Trager was nominated first by President George H.W. Bush, but confirmation dragged out in the fractiousness of the Senate. He was then nominated by a Democrat, President Clinton. By the time he was confirmed, Trager had been dean of Brooklyn Law School, chairman of the mayor’s committee on the selection of judges, chairman of the Temporary State Commission on Investigations, a member of the charter revision commission of New York City, and the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn. He had been sustained through much of that span by the backing of Senator Moynihan. And for even longer than that by a wonderful family life, which included a long and joyous marriage to Roberta Weisbrod and three children, all of whom were with him at his home in Brooklyn in his final heroic hours.